Firewood # 6 - The Wobble!

We have quite a few trees growing uncomfortably close to the house, and as we slowly tidy up we are trying to get rid of them, with the plan of replacing them hopefully with better trees planted in more appropriate locations.  Around the smallholding there are tons of Silver Birches, and one in particular is too close to the house.  I've been hesitating about cutting it down as it is very tall, and, in one direction it is about 6 metres from a telephone line serving our neighbours house and 4 metres from the lane, and in another direction it is about 8 metres from the house.  In other words if I got the felling wrong I would either be in trouble with our neighbours or Jo!

After many months of hesitation and procrastination, yesterday I thought I would sieze the day and sieze the chainsaw and go for it!  I've been eyeing it for several days, circling it to see which direction it naturally leans in the hope that it is away from the telephone line and away from the house!  Ideally I wanted it to fall directly away from the road, and luckily it does have a very slight lean that way.

There are plenty of step by step guides on the Internet and in books so I won't go into too much detail, the drawing below shows what I did to fell the tree:


How I Felled The Silver Birch

This is the biggest tree I have ever felled, and I must admit it was a massive relief when it all went according to plan and fell just where I wanted it to!  Jo had helpfully been telling me horror stories about someone who accidentally cut off his wife's head with a chainsaw which had increased the pressure to get it right and fell it safely quite a lot!   The first 2 cuts determine the direction of fall, and the 3rd cut creates a 'hinge', which allows the tree to fall in a controlled way.

The Hinge

Like everything, practice makes perfect - I'm sure the next one will be neater, but I'm still fairly happy with this.

The Result!

I measured the 'vital statistics' of the tree with results as follows:

	Circum.	Diameter	Area
Units	m	m	m^2
Top	0.4500	0.1432	0.0161
Bottom	1.1500	0.3661	0.1052
Length	12

'Bottom' means around 20cm above the ground, and 'Top' means the point where a single trunk stops and starts to become several smaller, but still vertical, branches.  It's a little bit difficult to see quite how much additional height above the 12m there is as most of it is stuck through a hedge at the moment(!) but from what I can see I would guess maybe 5m or more.

I wanted to calculate the volume, density and then derive the total weight of the firewood the tree yielded.  It would be really useful to have a rule of thumb by tree type to use in the future when, hopefully, we're using wood to cover all of our heating needs.  Anyway, the starting point for the calculation that I used was to assume that the main trunk of the tree is a truncated cone.  This would allow me to calculate the volume of the 'theoretical' cone (i.e. if the tree actually ended in a sharp point), and then subtract the volume of the part from diameter 0.1432m to the sharp point.  Cutting a simple cube, measuring it and weighing it gives the density and then we're in business!

 Beautiful Section - Future Cheeseboard I hope!

I cut a block, measured and weighed it and found that the density is approximately 1000kg/m^3, so our firewood pile is approximately 0.65m^2 x 1000 = 650kg


Propping prior to first sectioning cut

It was a bit nerve wracking but overall really pleased with the result - had a momentary 'wobble' just before the tree fell when I thought for a second it might be going the wrong way, but it all worked according to plan with no roads blocked, telephones disconnected, buildings or vehicles crushed!  Result!  I will be more confident on the next one!

Finally - apologies for the awful formatting of this post - hope any mathematicians have their microscopes on standby!

Ben explaining about sawdust to Mummy & Kate

 

 

Daddy's Little Helper!



Sausages # 1 -First Attempt!

@Lucyapley bought me Paul Peacock's "The Sausage Book" a while ago, and I made up my mind last week to use some of our pork mince to experiment with.  I ordered some sheep's intestine and some sausage nozzles from Amazon for our vintage Kenwood Chef.

I decided to make 3 different varieties: Basic Breakfast Sausage for the kids, Cumberland for Jo, and Linguica (a Portuguese Paprika sausage) for me!  After a morning of logging up a Silver Birch and going out for a last minute ingredient shop I began.

Ingredients!

This is the method I used:

Paprika Sausage: (based on Paul Peacock's Linguica)

Put 10g Smoked Paprika, 4g black pepper corns, 13g rock salt, 5 garlic cloves (crushed), 1 teaspoon of Chilli powder and a small glass of red wine into a blender and pulse until it looks like this:


Paprika Sausage Sauce!

I bought a bargain 'reduced' loaf of Polish brown bread and spread it out over the shelves of the oven and heated it in the oven at 100C for about 25 minutes until is was nice and dry, and then, in a clean blender jug made 100g of it into breadcrumbs and combined it with the Paprika Sausage Sauce.  Meantime the pork mince had defrosted (about 700g), and I added it to the bowl and started kneading.  I thoroughly kneaded and combined it - very similar process to breadmaking at this stage.  At this point the mixture looked like this:


Paprika Sausage Mix Ready for Stuffing!

Stuffing update at the end.

Cumberland Sausage (Based on Paul Peacock's Recipe)

I combined 10g black pepper corns, 10g sea salt, 5g nutmeg powder, a few shakes of mace, a small glass of white wine and blended them.  Same process as the Paprika sausage with 100g breadcrumbs to make a smooth paste.  Then I added 700g minced Saddleback Shoulder and kneaded to a lovely looking sausagey mix.

Basic Breakfast Sausage (Based on Paul Peacock's Recipe)

5g black pepper corns, 5g sea salt, 100g breadcrumbs and a glass of water, same process as the previous recipes.

Stuffing!

I soaked the sausage skin in cold water for about 2 hours - I was expecting a horrendous stink as described in Paul Peacock's book, but actually there wasn't any unpleasant smell.  After soaking I then ran tap water through the skins - easier said than done - it's quite tricky to open up the end and I'd managed to get it into quite a tangle during the soaking.  However, finally managed to get it all untangled and rolled onto the end of the sausage nozzle.

It worked really well - a few hiccups, most significant being running out of skins after the Cumberland and Basic Breakfast sausages!  Still - quite looking forward to Smoked Paprika burgers!



Tymawr Farm Cumberland Sausages!

Ben & Kate enjoyed eating their Basic Breakfast Sausages for tea tonight - Ben (2 and a half) ate 1 1/2 big sausages with mash, and Kate (nearly 9 months) ate nearly a whole one with mash.  Really glad about that - quite an achievement with normally quite discerning customers!

Jo and I ate one each too as a snack and they were really delicious (though I say so myself) - surprisingly peppery though (which we really like, but surprised the kids liked them).  Quite fortunate that they are nice as we are going to be eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next 2 days!